Guy Brandenburg offers a graph of 8th Grade scores on NAEP from 1992-2019 for four jurisdiction and invites you to find a miracle , if you can.
Betsy DeVos is using the federal Charter Schools Program as her personal slush fund. She recently dumped $46 million into New Hampshire in hopes of doubling the number of charters schools in that small state. The Governor Chris Sununu is a rightwing school choice zealot. The State Commissioner of Education Frank Edelblut homeschooled his children and is eager to eliminate public schools. The legislature was captured by Democrats in 2018. Time to stop the privatization of public money now!
The Network for Public Education Action urges you to speak out now on behalf of your community public schools and stop privatization.
https://npeaction.org/urgent-stop-charter-expansion-in-new-hampshire/
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This story in the Washington Post makes clear that Republican Governor Matt Bevin list because of his mean-spirited attacks on teachers, who are respected members of their communities. It was no accident that Bevin’s Democratic opponent Andy Beshear selected a teacher as his running mate.
When they marched on the statehouse in Frankfort, Ky., in the midst of a spring snowstorm and a political firestorm last year, teachers warned the governor: “We’ll remember in November.”
Nearly 20 months later, they appeared to have delivered on that promise, helping Democrat Andy Beshear receive about 5,100 more votes than Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in the Kentucky governor’s race. It is a state President Trump carried by 30 points in 2016.
Beshear’s apparent victory comes amid a national teacher uprising in which educators have staged walkouts in more than a dozen states — and some of the nation’s largest school systems — including conservative states like Kentucky.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Beshear gave credit to teachers.
“Your courage to stand up and fight against all of the bullying and name-calling helped galvanize our entire state,” said Beshear, who chose a teacher as his running mate. “To our educators, this is your victory.”
As attorney general, Beshear sued Bevin over his attempt to overhaul the teacher pension plan and prevailed. When Bevin sought educators’ records to investigate them for missing school to attend walkouts, Beshear sued to block the subpoena.
Educators in Kentucky — Republicans and Democrats — harnessed the momentum of those walkouts to try to propel Beshear to the governor’s office, with teacher volunteers proving key to the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, said David Turner, spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association.
Teachers had walked out of their classrooms over a middle-of-the-night amendment the governor pushed through to alter teacher pensions. Teachers ultimately prevailed, but not before Bevin lashed out, calling them “thuggish.” He suggested without evidence that children were being sexually assaulted and were using drugs while teachers protested, and later blamed the shooting of a 7-year-old girl on the walkout.
“We used Matt Bevin’s words against him,” Turner said. His comments “really incensed not just teachers, but the folks who are friends of families of the teachers, the neighbors of teachers…”
Ashlee Kinney, a special-education teacher at West Jessamine High in Nicholasville, Ky., is a lifelong Republican who had never voted for a Democrat for governor before Tuesday. A devout Christian, she is antiabortion, a position that puts her at odds with Beshear. But she said she worried more about the damage Bevin could do to schools than she did about how much Beshear could advance abortion rights.
Beshear, she said, is “a Kentucky boy and I feel like everywhere he goes he’s very polite and he’s very kind.”
“I feel like he cares for the poor and the less fortunate, and in my job, those are the kids I am teaching,” Kinney said.
W. J. Gumbert left the following comment about the state takeover of Houston, based on the low test scores of one high school. For the uninitiated, Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick hate public schools. John Arnold is a billionaire who made his money as an energy trader at Enron and now campaigns against public sector pensions and in favor of charter schools.
Gumbert writes:
Let’s remember that charters close their low performing campuses enrolling economically disadvantaged students to circumvent accountability. Wheatley HS is 93.8% economically disadvantaged, 78.9% “at-risk”, 20.5% special education and student mobility is 28.5%. Wheatley would be evaluated under the “alternative academic accountability standards if it was operated by a charter. Regardless, TEA assigned HISD an academic accountability rating of 88.
At the same time as HISD’s takeover, TEA has approved the following charters, operated by appointed boards, to expand despite operating campuses with a lower rating than Wheatley HS:
KIPP Texas – 4 campuses rated 46-54
International Leadership of Texas – 3 campuses rated 45-58
Harmony Science Academy (Waco) – 51
Jubilee Academies – 3 campuses rated 50-51
Great Hearts – 56
The takeover of HISD is SOLELY to allow TEA, Abbott, Lt. Dan and crew to implement the largest portfolio of privately operated charters in the nation. It is not a coincidence that John and Laura Arnold reside in Houston, have funded the expansion of the portfolio model and are funding IDEA’s expansion in Houston. It is time for everyone that cares about kids and democracy to take a stand!!!!!
I am a K-12 graduate of the Houston Independent School District. I am appalled that Texas officials would dare to strip Houston citizens of their elected board because of ONE LOW-PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOL. Wheatley High School happens to have a high concentration of students who live in poverty (88%), don’t speak English, and have special needs (19%).
The Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Mike Morath should be ashamed of themselves. Since when did Republicans become advocates of authoritarianism and enemies of local control?
Commissioner Mike Morath, who is not an educator but a software developer, joins this blog’s Wall of Shame.
For Immediate Release November 7, 2019 |
Contact:
Oriana Korin 202-374-6103 |
Educators Question State Takeover of HISD |
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HOUSTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Texas AFT and Houston Federation of Teachers President Zeph Capo issued the following statements in response to the Texas Education Agency’s announcement that it plans to take over local control of the Houston Independent School District:
Capo said:
“This is a power grab to disenfranchise families in Houston—particularly families of color—who just exercised their voice in a democratic vote on control of the city’s public schools. Now, the state government wants to step in and ignore that vote and exercise state control over this community because of one below-grade school, when the rest of them are scoring in the top tier in math and reading.
“What Houston’s students and their families really need is leadership: leadership that is committed to serving the needs of our local schoolchildren and the needs of the teachers who greet them every day. Educators must be assured that they, their students and their classrooms will be the focus of every decision, and our campuses must be able to thrive as safe and welcoming places for teaching and learning, unfettered by the machinations in Austin.
“The HFT has one goal: to look out for students—not to play politics with how we educate them.”
Weingarten said:
“This takeover by the Texas Education Agency strips the entire Houston community—particularly Houston’s families—of their basic right to have democratically governed public schools. It’s curiously timed during the exact moment the public are casting their votes to make changes in the Houston school board. But the fact remains: Teachers, parents and the community of Houston know what is best for Houston, and they have worked together over the last decade to see real improvement in Houston’s schools. Alarmingly, rather than focusing on that improvement, Austin bureaucrats are using one school’s challenges as the basis for stripping everyone in Houston of their voice.
“The state is playing a crude game of politics with public education in a shameful power grab that ignores students’ educational needs and disrespects the educators in the classroom. Using grossly flawed judgment, politicians in Austin have decided to use a blunt instrument that will undermine and disrupt the mission of community control of public education.
”We’ve been here enough times to know that our first priority must always be students, and our national union will do whatever we have to do to support the educators in this city in standing up for their kids and their schools against the state’s overreach. Our country’s history is replete with efforts to disenfranchise people of color and women, but Texas should not go down that ugly path again with this effort to take over the Houston school system.”
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| The American Federation of Teachers is a union of 1.7 million professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.
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Candidates backed by teachers for local school boards in the Denver area (including Denver) won all but one race.
Candidates supported by the teachers’ unions swept school board elections in Denver, Aurora, Douglas County, Littleton, Adams County, Cherry Creek, and Jeffco. The only candidate to lose was in Jeffco.
The “reformers” bold experiment in teacher-bashing has come to an end, at least for now.
Now it is time for the Colorado legislature to eliminate former state senator Michael Johnston’s failed educator evaluation law, which bases 50% of evaluations on test scores. The law was declared a failure even by its supporters but remains on the books. It did not identify “bad” teachers and it did not produce “great teachers, great principals, or great schools,” as Johnston promised in 2010 when his law was passed.
Reformer Van Schoales wrote in Education Week two years ago:
Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.
The problem, he said, was implementation. Every failed reform is dogged by poor implementation. That’s what they said about the Soviet Union and the Common Core.
When the Waltons paid for an analysis of their failure to pass a referendum to expand charter schools in Massachusetts in 2016, their advisors told them that teachers are trusted messengers. The public likes teachers and believes them. They are more credible than out of state billionaires. The Waltons, too, concluded that the problem with their message was poor implementation, not a rejection by the public, which values its public schools (I go into greater detail in my new book SLAYING GOLIATH, which will be published January 21.)
I am speechless. Wordless. How could anyone who cares about their reputation join the most shameless department in the most shameless administration in history? DeVos showed her colors when she harassed 16,000 students to pay debts for their time at the closed for-profit Corinthian Colleges when the debts would have been cancelled. She has repeatedly shown her views: her contempt for public schools and for civil rights enforcement.
Reported by Politico Morning Edition:
CAP’S COLLEEN CAMPBELL TO JOIN EDUCATION DEPARTMENT: Campbell, the director of postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, will join the department later this month to oversee strategic communications for the NextGen project.
— NextGen’s goal is to overhaul how the federal government collects student loans.It involves creating and running a new platform on which tens of millions of borrowers will manage their loans, as well as awarding contracts that are collectively worth billions of dollars to financial services companies.
— During her time at CAP, Campbell wroteextensively about the department’s student loan servicing proposals and has been widely quoted about the issue in the press.
— Campbell said she decided to take a role in “a government and an administration under someone who I don’t always agree with” because she believes the Office of Federal Student Aid has “a vision that’s borrower- and student-focused” when it comes to the NextGen plan.
— Campbell’s hiring brings new progressive credibility to a project that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has described as one of the major ways she’s working to modernize and streamline how the department operates. Read more from Michael Stratford.
I am not sure that I agree with Steven Singer’s point here, that NAEP scores tell us nothing other than that students from affluent homes have higher test scores than students who live in poverty.
His main point is undeniable. All standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income.
We could use income and poverty data to learn what the test scores tell us, without wasting billions on standardized tests and corrupting instruction.
But I think that NAEP does tell us something we need official confirmation for: the utter failure of Disruptive Corporate Reform.
The Disrupters have promised since No Child Left Behind was proposed in 2001 that they knew how to raise test scores and close achievement gaps: Test every child every year and hold schools accountable for rising or falling scores. That will do it, said George W. Bush, Margaret Spellings, Rod Paige and Sandy Kress. They rode the wave of the “Texas miracle,” which turned out to be non-existent. Texas in 2019 is stuck right in the middle of the distribution of states.
Then came Jeb Bush, with his fantastical claims of a “Florida miracle,” which are now repeated by Betsy DeVos. Look at the NAEP scores: Florida is right in the middle of the states. No miracle there.
Arne Duncan has been promoting Tennessee, which as one of the first Race to the Top states, which is also ensconced in the middle of the distribution.
Two states that were firmly under the control of Reform heroes, Louisiana and New Mexico, are at the tail end of the distribution.
What do the NAEP scores tell us?
Don’t look for miracles.
Don’t believe propaganda spun by snake-oil salesman.
Look to states and districts that are economically developed and that fund their schools adequately and fairly.
The scores in states may go up or down a few points, but the bottom line is that the basics matter most. That is, a state willing and able to support education and families able to support their children.
Angie Sullivan teaches in an underfunded Title 1 school in Las Vegas where many students are impoverished and don’t speak English. She frequently writes blast emails to Nevada legislators and journalists.
Margaret Raymond once joked that Nevada has the worst charter sector in the nation. From Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in 2015:
“Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst,” charter researcher Margaret “Macke” Raymond said of Ohio. Raymond, from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, conducts research on charter schools and issued a report late last year that said Ohio charter school students learn 36 days less math and 14 days less reading than traditional public school students — conclusions she drew from crunching data obtained from student standardized test scores.
Nevada charter schools continues to be a failed sector, but the money keeps flowing. Even Andre Agassi’s much-celebrated charter school, the Andre Agassi Academy, ended up on the list of the state’s lowest performing schools and was turned over to New York City-based “Democracy Prep.” The Agassi charter had plenty of money but run through multiple principals and staff, and the school was noted for disorder, not for accomplishment.
Angie Sullivan writes:
This is the Nevada Charter Authority.
Charter Authority folks openly discussing giving money to “priority providers”?
Millions to friends? Acquaintances? Friends of friends?
Priority is someone with great “scores”? And the testing protocol is what exactly? What is in place to prevent cheating?
How exactly does one become a priority provider?
You have to “know someone” and have “scores”?
Several of the applicants cannot fill out the application completely & on time.
If they miss deadlines, the rules are bent because they are “special” in some other way?
There was a discussion with a warning from the attorney to not accept folks and give them millions if they cannot fill out the form.
Seems “priority folks” do not have the ability to follow directions, wait their turn, or behave.
If you google the “priority person” and they are followed by lawsuits and scandals are they still priority?
Let me be clear.
There are NO clean hands in Nevada Charters. Not a single Nevada charter has three years of academic data by campus. Not a single charter has clear money trails that can be followed. The Nevada Tax Payer cannot see what charter campuses are doing.
Zero academic or financial accountability.
A referral from anyone running or involved in a current Nevada charter – is a bad referral.
$350 million plus is actually passed around by a handful of folks – including legislators or former legislators or prospective legislators.
For-profit Academica must expand to cash in. Is that body a “priority”?
How nice of the Charter Authority to record themselves discussing how they will be passing out millions to their friends and bending rules to do it?
This is disgusting.
Imagine a brand new nonprofit organization starting with more than $200 million. The usual group of billionaires has funded an organization called the City Fund, whose main purpose seems to be to buy local school board elections. Thus far, they have targeted Atlanta, Indianapolis, Newark, Denver, San Antonio, St. Louis, and Nashville, but they may have added or subtracted other sites. The City Fund is active in several elections. If they gain control, they will replace public schools with privately managed charter schools. The privatizers are really good at Disruption, not at improving schools or education.
William Phillis warns that the City Fund is active in Ohio, where most charter schools are rated D or F, lower-performing than even the urban districts they seek to dominate.
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